Q&A: Shelley Berman on love, life and 63 years of marriage

More and more when I’m interviewing someone for a San Francisco Chronicle article, I try to throw in one or two parenting or marriage-related questions that might be appreciated by our The Poop audience. Often it doesn’t really go anywhere, and I move on. Other times the line of questioning goes in a fantastic new direction, and I share the results with you. The Dana Carvey interview may be my favorite example of this to date.

At least until I spoke with Shelley Berman last week. Now it’s probably a tie.

superchefblog.com

Berman’s groundbreaking comedy album.

Berman, 85, is a comedy legend, coming up in the late 1950s with comedians such as Mort Sahl and Lenny Bruce at the hungry i, a ground-breaking comedy club in San Francisco. Berman and his contemporaries paved the way for the modern observational comedian, and did a lot to help the public to recognize stand-up comedy as art.

I saved all the parts about parenting, love and marriage for The Poop. For the record, I didn’t cry during the interview, but I was very moved when I transcribed the tape — and again when I re-read Berman’s poem to his wife, which I included at the end of this piece.

Q: There’s one question I want to ask the most, and it has nothing to do with comedy.

A: Now you’ve got me curious.

Q: You’ve been married 63 years. What advice would you give to a young married couple?

A: The thing is, I don’t know the accident of still being married. I was the worst human being. But we were, I guess, in love. So much has happened to us to bring us together and keep us together. Not the least of which was a sad thing, losing our son.

Q: I’m sorry to hear that.

A: He was up there a couple of times with me. We stayed in Sausalito. He loved it and I loved him, of course. That was part our life — having that guy and living with him and learning from him. Thirteen years he lived with us. He didn’t make it to his bar mitzvah. (Joshua Berman died from a brain tumor in the mid-1970s.) We lived together and suffered together, and that cemented everything. But of course we were pretty tied up before. She’s sitting here with a big smile on her face, looking at me.

Q: She still makes you laugh?

A: She makes me laugh constantly. And I don’t know when. we’ll be lying there in the bed, and I’m almost asleep, and she says something funny and we’re laughing. That probably is more important than anything else.

Q: You also have a daughter?

A: She’s a pain in the neck, but what can we say? She’s part of our lives, and we love her, in spite of her. She lives in North Carolina. I keep telling my wife it’s not far enough. (Laughs)

Q: Oh no. I’m sure you miss her a little bit.

A: (Laughs) Of course we do.

Q: Any grandchildren?

A: Yes, we have two. If I tell you the spacing, you won’t believe it. Josh has just become 18, and she has another one who is 6 years old.

Q: That’s two different kinds of stress — 6 and 18.

A: Yes, and the kid’s autistic, but I’ve not seen her being a better mother. The way she’s working with that kid and making things happen, well I haven’t admired her as much as I do today. He’s talking and doing everything right. He’s a beautiful child. There’s a group that takes autistic kids out surfing. It’s hard to describe what they do, but they give them a wonderful time on the beach.

Q: I run our parenting blog and I’ve learned about autistic kids from our readers. The biggest lesson: with children, there’s no such thing as not being normal.

A: That’s wonderful I’m glad you’re part of that.

Q: Do you see your grandchildren often?

A: We don’t get to see them enough. It’s hard to move the younger one out and back. But we see the pictures, and talk to him on the phone.

Q: I enjoyed your poems about your wife. When do you write them?

A: I just sit down and write. I never know when. The most recent one is “Sarah Still,” which is about our life, Sarah and me. It’s my favorite of all my poems.

Q: I’ll make sure our readers get a link to it. (Look for it at the end of this interview.) I promised I wouldn’t take too much of your time.

A: If there’s someone there who wants to say a nice thing, how can I overlook it? I’ve got these two wonderful people who run my web site and put me on Facebook. They didn’t even ask me. I’m very appreciative of it. The biggest problem is my password. I’ve got to tell you, every time I use my password I’m told it isn’t valid. I don’t know what to do about it.

PETER HARTLAUB is the pop culture critic at the San Francisco Chronicle and founder of this parenting blog, which admittedly sometimes has nothing to do with parenting. You can follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/peterhartlaub.